Welcome to the website of author Gene
McCormick. A listing of his available books, with a brief synopsis, follows.

Obsessions

December 2016

A new novel by Gene McCormick

Obsessions of daily life including passion, mystery, and even a minute or two of
off-center romance provide emotional heft to a highly nuanced, uniquely
evocative exploitation of minutes and hours ticking by in a multi-layered,
thought-provoking, genteel insanity.
Obsessions is, on the surface, accessible to the brink of literal
transparency but a walk in a forest preserve, being parked in a shopping mall in
a thunderstorm, going fishing, rubbing on lotion prove not so routine. As Neil
Gaiman has said “Things can mean more than they literally mean.”

Obsessions
is a novel, a short story, a book-length narrative poem.

Author Bio:
This is Gene McCormick’s twenty-first book, a mix of fiction, poetry and
non-fiction. He lives in Wayne, Illinois.

Working the mean streets through the big town’s inner-city. .
.Heavy sky all day,

the sun stays down, there is no moon. Running the length of
the city block lit

only by an occasional streetlight, a chain link wall creates a
meaningless divide

between street people and tenement dwellers. A large dog barks
on the tenement

side standing near a trash bin and burned-out car. Window
shades are pulled to

the sill; graffiti marks walls, alley, the dumpster. Along the
other side of the

fence, the sidewalk is slathered with black ice and snow slush
covering broken

bottle glass. Concave pockets in the fence mark where the
hapless are slammed

against chain links, mugged. A ﬁre hydrant tilts at a twenty
degree angle.

No sun, no moon, no matter. Sometimes footsteps are heard,
sometimes not.

Published by MBS Press, Chicago

C’est la Vie

:

Paris

:

June, 2014

Gene McCormick’s latest collection of narrative poetry.

C'est la Vie is
an illustrated journal in the form of a chapbook reflecting contemporary Paris,
both through its people and sites.

Published by Chicago City Press

La Vie en Rose: PARIS TODAY is Gene McCormick’s
fourteenth book. His writing regularly appears in select literary journals, a
number of his narrative poems have been converted to music, and his art is in
commercial and private collections He lives in Wayne, Illinois.

Published by Chicago City Press

Hand-hewn poems of the America behind the headlines,
away from the glitz and glamour, far
from the tall buildings and high ﬁnance. Mr. McCormick is the anti-Norman
Rockwell, painting
not the ideal, but the dirty bricks and stone , the ﬂat ﬁres and lives, and the
one for the road that
goes nowhere.—Phil Wagner, editor, The Iconoclast.

Gene McCormick’s collection of
narrative poetry (poems as stories, stories as poems), An Ice Axe At Dusk,
is published by March Street Press. The 81+ page collection consists
of 57 new, or previously uncollected, vignettes of recognizable people—and
sometimes objects—working through their daily lives.

Early reviews have been favorable. Says
Alan Catlin, author of Near Death in the Afternoon on Becker Street:
“Reading Gene McCormick's An Ice Ax at Dusk is like looking at paintings
by Edward Hopper; the ones featuring shadows and light, empty rooms at different
hours of the day, a sunset viewed over railway tracks and telephone wires, a
well-lighted boardinghouse as seen from outside. Waiting, inside, are ordinary
people, not necessarily living lives of quiet desperation, as just getting by.
This is what good narrative poetry is all about and Gene McCormick is a modern
master of the form.”

The book’s title was inspired by Franz Kafka’s quote: “A book must be an ice ax,
to break the sea within us.”

An Ice Axe At Dusk

Signed copies can be ordered direct from the author:
Genebiz@att.net
($9 + $2 s/h)

Livin’ The Blues At Cranky Jack’s Bar & Grill has been published by
MuscleHead Press, a Division of
BoneWorld Publishing, Russell, NY. The 42-page collection contains new and
previously published poems. According to Gene, “Livin' The Blues At Cranky
Jack's Bar & Grill contains some of my earliest writing, reflecting the
realities of life as it is lived on a daily basis but with a bit of an earthy
edge.” The chapbook is in three segments, each making observations from a
slightly different, maybe skewed, perspective.

"Gene McCormick's latest book, a literary
virtual tour of a colorful town, chased my blues away. It was a treat to meet
its denizens. The book actually read more like a novella than a narrative
collection--a novella rich in breadth, depth and the nuance of language."

--Rex Sexton, author
of X-Ray Eyes

Livin’ The Blues At Cranky
Jack’s Bar & Grill can be ordered direct from the author for
$10.00, cash or check, postage and handling included. Please specify if you want
the book signed or inscribed. Send payment to Gene McCormick, PO Box 51, Wayne,
IL 60184.

Gene McCormick’s narrative poetry
collection, Naked Skeletons (ISBN 1-58998-915-5), has been published
by
Pudding House Publications, Columbus,
Ohio. The 34-page chapbook contains twenty new, previously unpublished poems.
According to the author, “The poems in Naked Skeletons are reality-based,
heightened story-telling of daily life episodes of which we all have to work
through, or are aware of. The poems are meant as stories, clear and accessible.
There is no tricky wordplay; the messages are in the content.” Naked
Skeletons can be ordered direct from the author for $10.00, cash or check,
postage and handling included. Please specify if you want the book signed or
inscribed. Send payment to Gene McCormick, PO Box 51, Wayne, IL 60184.
To pay by credit card, please order direct from Pudding House Publications, 81
Shadymere Lane, Columbus, OH 43213.
info@puddinghouse.com. Telephone 614-986-1881.There will be a postage and
handling fee on books ordered from the publisher.

Tanya, Queen Of The Greasy Spoon, a collection ofnarrative poetic storytelling,
is one of McCormick’s most recent books. Reviewer Richard Pulfer, writing in The
Rockford Review, says “Tanya,Queen Of The Greasy Spoon is a
dazzling, delectable and disturbing piece, all in one bite.” Charles Portolano,
author of All Eyes On US, says “McCormick’s writing is alluring, taking
me places I’ve never been, seeing sights I’ve never seen, thinking thoughts new
to my way of thinking.” Tanya, Queen Of The Greasy Spoon ($14.95
paperback, ISBN 978-1-4327-4851-7, Outskirts Press) is available through online
sources such as
Amazon.com and can be ordered through bookstores.

Rain On The Sun
is a collection of fictive narrative dramatizations: short stories and episodic
poems centered around people at work and at play. The gamut of emotions and
settings runs from beauty to surrender, murder, obsession, mystery, celebration,
suicide, cheating, loyalties, reflection, fables, redemption, hustlers,
lovers…and fate. Rain On The Sun ($14.95 paperback, ISBN
978-1-4327-2445-0) is available through online book sources such as
Amazon.com and
Barnesandnoble.com,
and can be ordered through bookstores.

The Blue Collar Thoroughbred
and The Eagle & The Plum,
non-fiction books stressing racing life at
mid-level, are both still in print and can be ordered through this site or
through normal online sources such as Amazon.com.
Your local bookstore will be glad to special order any of the in-print titles by
McCormick.

McCormick’s earlier
titles can be found on
Amazon.com or several of the used and antiquarian sites such as
ABEbooks or
Biblio, or by doing a
Google search. Contact us at this site if you have difficulty tracking down
a specific title.

Thank you for checking
out the Gene McCormick Books website. Let us know how we can better serve you.

The Eagle & The Plum: The True Story of
Racing's Toughest Horses (Paperback)